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Displaying items by tag: PSP Pluvier

#NAVAL VISIT – A sistership of the French Naval patrol vessel that performed 'guardship' duties during last year's La Solitaire du Figaro Race to Dun Laoghaire (click HERE), is due to dock in Dublin Port in advance of St. Patrick's weekend, writes Jehan Ashmore.

PSP Pluvier (P678) is a 54m offshore patrol vessel (OPV) that belongs to a trio of the'Flamant' class, the remaining pair are the leadship PSP Flamant (P676) and PSP Cormoran (P677). The latter OPV escorted the race fleet on the second leg between Ouistreham (Caen) to Dun Laoghaire, the only international port of call of the prestigious race.

The naval visitor is the last of the sisters built and was constructed in Cherbourg at Chantier des Constructions Mécaniques de Normandie (CMN). She entered service in 1997 and carries out patrols in seas up to 200 nautical miles offshore of the French économique exclusive zone (ZEE).

She is scheduled to arrive on Thursday afternoon and berth at Sir John Rogersons Quay, downriver from the Samuel Beckett swing-bridge.

Published in Navy

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.